"The Salt in a Merchant's Letter": Julfan Armenian Long Distance Mercantile Networks and the Art of Long-Distance Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean

This paper will discuss the early modern mercantile and information networks of Julfan Armenian merchants from Isfahan, focus on the art of Julfan commercial correspondence, and highlight the importance of a vast corpus of newly discovered Julfa dialect documents, “indigenous” to the world of Islamicate Eurasia, to the (re)writing of Indian Ocean historiography.